Peter Mayle has dominated the nonfiction best-seller lists in recent years with his chronicles of life in the south of France. A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence (both published in the United States in 1991) even spawned a fourpart television series, which was produced by the BBC and has run regularly on the Arts & Entertainment Network since its debut in the spring of 1993. Mayle’s name has graced (and sold) picture books and calendars featuring paintings of Provence, and his first novel (set in—where else?—Provence) received a favorable write-up in the New York Times Book Review when it appeared last fall.

Mayle’s recent literary fame—and fortune—has only enhanced the already comfortable life he was leading as a former advertising executive-turned-writer. In an interview with Mayle last October, PubUshers Weekly described his writing career as “one stroke of luck after another.” Mayle ended a 15-year career in advertising (split between London and New York) in 1975, after he sold his manuscript for an illustrated children’s sex manual entitled Where Did I Come From? to a publisher in 15 minutes. (The book is still in print and has been translated into 17 languages.) This success inspired 12 relatively lean years of writing in Devon, England, before Mayle and his third wife Jenny decided to move to Provence, where they had vacationed for years, in 1986. Both A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence recount how they refurbished an 18th-century farmhouse near Menerbes and adapted to new physical, linguistic, and gastronomical surroundings.

Mayle follows a long line of both French and foreign writers about Provence, and many of his observations have already been made by others. This makes them no less true—or amusing. Mayle makes good use of his senses, following the example of Lawrence Durrell, who “experienc[ed] the country with [his] feet as well as [his] tongue.” Me shows an appreciation for the grey crags, green brush, blue sky, and yellow light that comprise Provence’s scenery, as well as for the garlic, melons, goat cheese, herbs, asparagus, olive oil, thick-crusted bread, and robust wine that constitute its cuisine. Indeed, food and drink are as much of an obsession for him as they are for the French themselves. Mayle’s Year in Provence begins with a New Year’s Day lunch and ends with a Christmas dinner of leg of lamb at a nearby auberge. In between are trips to various markets and boulangeries; lessons in truffle gathering, game hunting, olive pressing, and rabbit husbandry; and introductions to cherry picking and grape harvesting. As M.F.K. Fisher once observed, even the lower classes in France eat well, and Mayle’s descriptions of a truck driver’s lunch or a peasant’s evening meal make an American reader wish for a day in the life of a French worker or farmer.

But Mayle’s books offer more than menus. In both his fiction and his nonfiction, Mayle is a modern-day Henry James in his attention to the habits and characteristics of France’s natives. He does a particularly nice job of conveying what Durrell termed the “conversational salt” of the Midi. His accounts of the Provencal language (” . . . it was a rich, soupy patois, emanating from somewhere at the back of the throat and passing through a scrambling process in the nasal passages before coming out as speech”), greetings (“To be engulfed by a Provençal welcome [is] as thorough and searching as being frisked by airport security guards”), and gestures (” . . . jerky aerobics . . . accompany any heated conversation in Provence—shoulders twitching, arms waving, hands waggling in emphasis, eyebrows threatening to disappear upwards into [one’s] cap”) border on caricature, as critics of both his books and the TV series have argued; but, exaggerated or not, these images elucidate the personality of a people.

Yet such comments reveal only the comic side of the Provençal character; as Jacques Chabot noted in a book called La Provence de [Jean] Giono (1980), there is another more somber and secret side to this character, especially among the inhabitants of the mountains of Upper Provence. Mayle’s sketches exhibit only a superficial understanding of both the natural elements and the human history that shape life in Provence. To be sure, Mayle refers to the intense heat and bright light of summer days here, but for him they mean no more than the necessity to spend afternoons by the pool. In reality, such heat and light affect perhaps the most important—and certainly the most precarious—resource in Provence: water. The viewer of Claude Berri’s film Jean de Florette (based on a novel by Provence’s most popular native-son, Marcel Pagnol) can sense the torridity produced by a summer without rain in frames of hazy sky, withered stalks, and dead rabbits accompanied by a sound-track of chirping cicadas. (As Alphonse Daudet—another native-son—remarked, the shrill cry of the cicadas “seems the very resonance of the immense luminous vibration” of a July afternoon.) Jean’s long, painful, and—ultimately—fatal struggle to supply his household and small farm with water after his neighbors have plugged the spring on his property illustrates why Pagnol’s compatriots consider water to be “liquid gold.” Lack of water in summer can mean seemingly interminable droughts (and sometimes forest fires), while too much water in springtime can yield dangerous floods. This and similar dualities (as between the burning heat of the sun and the frigid gusts of the “Mistral,” a wind that sweeps from the Alps down the Rhone Valley to wreak havoc with the hats—and temperaments—of all Provençaux) profoundly influence both natural and social life in Provence.

Jean Giono, among other Provençal writers, recognized the “cycle of eternal return” inherent in these dualities. Nature to Giono is sensual, and days as well as seasons are not linear but round. Man’s labors follow nature and are therefore round as well: plowing leads to planting, which in turn leads eventually to harvesting, until the cycle is completed and plowing begins again. Lawrence Durrell, steeped in the Greek and Roman past of the region, noted the “momentous simultaneousness” of history endlessly repeating itself and recycled Giono’s geometrical metaphor in the title of the last chapter of his book Caesar’s Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence—”Le Cercle Referme” (“The Circle Closed Again”).

History also suffuses the poetry of Ezra Pound and Frederic Mistral. Pound took a “voyage through time and space” for the notes that became A Walking Tour in Southern France (edited by Richard Sieburth). For him, the land of the Troubadours is a land “thick with ghosts,” and his journey takes him back to his poetic origins: “[I]f we are to understand that part of our civilization which is the art of verse,” he wrote, “we must begin at the root, and that root is medieval. The poetic art of Provence paved the way for the poetic art of Tuscany; and to this Dante bears sufficient witness in the De Vulgari Eloquio.” Mistral likewise seeks his roots in Provence, although (in contrast to the expatriate Pound’s) his connections to the region are not only poetic, but physical, linguistic, and social as well. In his memoirs, Mistral recounts how at the age of 21 he returned from Aix-en-Provence, where he had attended law school, to his father’s farm to rediscover these roots for himself and others:

Then and there . . . with my foot on the threshold of my father’s house and my eyes turned toward the Alpilles, I made a silent vow to myself: first, to raise and revive in Provence the traditional spirit that was being destroyed by all the schools and their false and unnatural education; second, to promote that revival by restoring the natural and historical language of the country, against which all the schools were waging a war to the death; third, to bring Provençal back into fashion through the benign influence and divine fire of poetry.

It is Mistral’s familiarity with the history of his family (an old line for which the great wind is named) and his region that inspires his writing.

Poetry and farming are both sacred arts to Mistral; he is a troubadour in the truest sense of the word, “one who seeks to find” the spirit of a place—or of mankind. It is this sense of place and self that writers like Mistral, Durrell, Giono, Pagnol, Pound, and M.F.K. Fisher express so eloquently—and that Mayle unfortunately seems to lack. Unlike other writers who have made Provence even temporarily their home, Mayle has made no effort to cultivate either nature or himself. Mayle does not see, as did Durrell, that Provence is a “place of revelations”; he does not experience, as did Pound, any “epiphanies”; his memories do not, as did M.F.K. Fisher’s, become part of his “spiritual marrow”; his Provence is not, as was Giono’s, the setting for a universal tragedy based on the “terrible joy of existing.” In contrast to another Englishman now living in Provence, Julian More, Mayle does not have “southern France in [his] blood.” More’s pictorially and literarily gorgeous book Views From a French Farmhouse consequently reveals more of the region’s essence in its reflections on four seasons there than any number of sequels to A Year in Provence ever will.

The reason for this is simple: Mayle does not comprehend that quality of life is based on more than physical comfort; he fails to see that it also requires spiritual enlightenment. Mayle’s novel Hotel Pastis demonstrates his fondness for the former and his neglect of the latter. While Hotel Pastis is certainly an entertaining book, it offers no enlightenment (except maybe a hint to stay away from hotels run by and for the rich and famous) but onlv escape. Hotel Pastis is the story of Simon Shaw, a British advertising executive who, like Mayle himself, flees the harried and glamorous life he has been leading in London to settle into a (at least initially) more tranquil existence in Provence. While Simon supports himself by opening a hotel rather than by writing a travelogue, the parallels between him and his creator are transparent—his financial worries are trivial (nonexistent), his female companion is a gourmet cook, his contact with locals consists mainly of conversations with the architects and workers he employs to fix up his property, etc. Although there is an adventure with some bank robbers thrown into the mixture this time around, Mayle essentially repeats the anecdotes about life as a newcomer to the region that he relayed in A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence.

Hotel Pastis is not merely repetitive; it is blasé, and Simon’s recurrent whining about the ennui he feels first as part of London’s wealthy and beautiful set and then as the owner of a hotel that attracts this set is tiresome. In escapist mode, Mayle identifies Provence with “no executive committees” and “perfectly tanned cleavage.” While he aims to show the superiority of the business of living over the business of business, it is business pure and simple that wins out in the end—in both the novel (when Simon abandons his hotel to handle advertising for a Texas millionaire) and the life (the 50-something Mayle is reportedly a millionaire himself now). Mayle cannot break out of his role as a propagandist for consumer society; ever the adman, he approaches Provence as if it were a product to be marketed, and his books have all the slickness of a promotional brochure.

Mayle will never be more than a permanent visitor to Provence, and his picture of the region is that of a tourist. Jacques Chabot, in his examination of Giono’s Provence, warns against such obliviousness to the mysterious, solitary, haunting, and painful side of the place: “it is necessary—under risk of letting oneself fall into the ideological flatness of I don’t which Edenic-touristic Provence—to savor all the salt of that immediate and concrete existence which would change, in the absence of death (the salt of life), into insipidity.” Mayle, who never contemplates much of anything beyond his next meal, fails to find any salt in his paradise.

But, then again, his books do make for a fun read, which is more than can be said of most best-sellers these days. And maybe it is enough that he has renewed interest in a region that embodies so much of the West’s poetry and history—and that has so much to teach us not only about death, but about life: how to walk slowly, work hard, eat well, enjoy nature, and converse with our fellow men. As Matthew Arnold wrote in Empedocles on Etna:

Is it so small a thing

To have enjoyed the sun.

To have lived light in the spring.

To have loved, to have thought,
to have done . . . ?